Diversification and Performance : The Nordic Media Market

by Persson, Fredrik; Lindgren, Jonas

Abstract (Summary)

The Nordic media market has since the end of the 1990’s experienced a number of consolidations and the market has become increasingly integrated. Some companies within the market are diversified, meaning they are involved in many different kinds of businesses, while other are focused, which implies that they are focused on one business segment.Different research views explain different motives for diversification. The resource view explain diversification by claiming that a company having underused resources needs to profitably employ them elsewhere in order to expand. The agency view explains diversification with the agent’s different incentives compared to the principal. The market power view implies that by having more resources a company can strengthen its competitiveness. Furthermore, there may be financial and synergetic motives behind diversification.This thesis investigates the relation diversification has with size, sales growth, financial efficiency ratios, and stability. By doing this we can explain the motives behind diversification in the Nordic media market through using existing theories and hence applying a deductive research approach. The thirty largest media companies in the Nordic media market were analyzed.The degree of diversification had a positive relationship with the total revenue of the investigated firms. Furthermore, diversified firms on average had higher revenues than its focused counterparts. The more diversified the firms are the higher sales growth they have and diversified companies had a higher average sales growth than the focused firms. A higher degree of diversification did not increase the firms’ financial efficiency and diversified firms did not have a higher average efficiency. However, one of the measured ratios, ROA, was higher for focused firms. Based on knowledge gained from portfolio theory we believed, before conducting the statistical analyses, that a higher degree of diversification would stabilize the cash flows for the investigated companies. However, no statistical evidence was found supporting that a higher degree of diversification would improve cash flow stability.